"Batman Forever" and "Batman & Robin" - hubpages.com

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By Anders Fischer

It’s kind of funny when you think about it, but the conceptual
development of the modern Batman movies has followed a nearly
identical track to the original comics. Batman was first introduced
back in 1939 as a sort of middle ground between the wild fantasy of
the Superman style of comics that was just getting started and the
more established pulp noir formula. As such, he wasn’t exactly “good,
clean, All-American fun,” but rather a fairly dark vigilante character
who was initially sought by police as much as he was feared by
criminals, who fostered a disconnect between himself and his audience
and, yes, who killed people. A lot.

Skip ahead fifty years to 1989 and Tim Burton introduces us to Batman,
a movie devoted to recreating that dark, unpredictable quasi antihero
who was hunted by the police (in both this movie and its sequel) and
who would kill his foes. Hell, the Burton Batman movies even looked
like they took place in the thirties.

For the comics, everything changed quickly in 1940 when Robin was
introduced as a means of lightening the stories (bringing them further
from noir and closer to Superman) and generating a more kid-friendly
aesthetic. Similarly, after Batman Returns Tim Burton was booted from
the director’s seat by studios that wanted to appeal more to younger
audiences (or, more precisely, to their over-protective, busybody
parents) and so Joel Schumacher was hired to replace him for Batman
Forever, which – among other things – softened the tone considerably,
focused much more on humor and action and, of course, introduced the
character of Robin.

Here you can see the lighter tone represented by... well... various
different colors of light.
The comics would later go on to darken the character again in the
seventies and eighties; and likewise the movies would eventually
reboot themselves under Christopher Nolan (who clearly draws a lot of
his inspiration from certain seminal “dark” texts from that era).

But returning to Schumacher, his movies are generally considered the
worst of the lot, the anti-Burtons (at least to those who know there
were two directors for the nineties movies) and frankly an
embarrassment to the franchise, the character and to humanity in
general. And this isn’t an unfair assessment; after all, Schumacher
did essentially unwrite everything Burton inscribed into the public
consciousness.

Before 1989 most people thought of Batman as Adam West, as a guy from
a show so cheap and so bad that its title character once got away with
dressing up as a dinosaur to convince his enemies that he was an
actual dinosaur revived from a giant egg. Burton’s success was in not
only undoing all that, but in re-appropriating its inherent wackiness
(and certain visuals) into something altogether more dangerous. And
Schumacher’s great failure is in regressing everything back to the
days when things weren’t weird, but dopey; where they weren’t clever,
just loud and obnoxious; where the humor lacked wit and everything was
safe and predictable and the heroes always triumphed in the end
because the villains were so comically useless. Batman was a
surprisingly macabre take on the character that paved the way for the
gloomy (and brilliant) animated series and even the more recent
movies, while Batman and Robin is Adam West all over again, just with
a higher budget.

So, yeah, Schumacher didn’t exactly do a great job, but calling him
the worst of the three may be a bit of a stretch, as he and Nolan both
make the same basic mistake. They each muck up the balance that Burton
brought to his movies, that balance between real character drama (to
give everything weight) and complete, unabashed comic book absurdity
(to keep it dynamic and unique) and between humor and horror. Nolan
ultimately made things too drab, too po-faced, too obsessed with
pedantic realism; while Schumacher fell to the other extreme and made
things too zany, too over-the-top, he made everything so light and
fluffy that his stories ultimately lack any sense of gravity.

Everybody knows about this and how bad it would get and everybody has
their favorite worst joke: whether it be bat credit cards, the
fetishized suiting-up sequences, the petty bitchings of the dynamic
duo resulting in dips in giant vats of yogurt, the ice puns, Bane,
whatever. It gets pretty bad, and there are times where I consider
Batman and Robin completely unwatchable.

But – to be fair – that’s somewhat less true of Batman Forever, which
is actually fairly adequate and, believe it or not, has the tightest
plot of all six movies to date (excepting some stuff near the end);
it’s a stupid plot (Riddler stealing brainwaves and all), but it’s
tight. Beyond that, Batman Forever acts as a sort of transitional
period between the Burton pinnacle (as represented by Batman Returns)
and the Schumacher nadir (Batman and Robin). You can see numerous
elements of both approaches. It keeps Burton’s titling scheme, his
bulletproof batsuit, his random girlfriend who is treated as all-
important for this one movie and then forgotten by the next and his
willingness to have Batman kill.

It also tries its damnedest to have Val Kilmer emulate the awkwardness
of Michael Keaton’s Bruce Wayne. Take the scene at Chase’s office,
where he knocks in her door and then clumsily tries to brace it back
up, I could possibly see Keaton doing that. It’s still not great
though, is it? And there are a lot of moments where Kilmer just
doesn’t seem to get the complexities of his role. Later on in that
same scene, we have Bruce declaring to Chase that “I need to get you
out of those clothes… and into a black dress,” the sort of line
Keaton’s Wayne would have stumbled over, really selling that he just
didn’t know how to do this sort of thing; but with Kilmer I can’t tell
if he’s just spacing or if he’s actually shooting for smooth.

There is some other evidence to suggest that Schumacher is trying more
to return to the ditzy playboy approach to Bruce Wayne (his later
seduction of Sugar for example), but the meekness of Kilmer’s
portrayal (when compared to, say, Christian Bale’s over-the-top
oafishness) leaves him kind of stranded between traditional Bruce and
Keaton’s more nuanced interpretation.

His Batman is also a dull, uninteresting plank, like Bale’s but
without the one scene or so per film that makes him briefly okay.

Ultimately, Val Kilmer is like his movie: inoffensive, but not as
distinctive as those that surround him.

And of course, Batman Forever sets us up for the coming disaster in
Batman and Robin in several exciting ways: from the increased use of
humor, to a more toned-down Dark Knight who doesn’t run afoul of the
police, to Robin’s “Holy rusted metal” line that – while ironic –
echoes things to come, and to the glitzy, acid trip visuals that look
like Schumacher just discovered blacklights and had to tack them on to
everything: the walls, the cars, Christ even the guns and batarangs
light up.

But, I think, most of these are pretty well balanced in Forever. The
humor in most cases isn’t as intrusive as it would be later – and a
lot of times is actually funny. There is a thematic value to the
restrained Batman (we’ll get to this) and for all the wackiness,
having the two villains discover Batman’s identity and act on it ramps
up the scale and urgency like never before (in theory). And in a nice
touch, this also requires him to turn to two previously one-off
vehicle: the Bat Wing (from the ’89 movie) and the Bat Boat (from
Returns).

No, these things aren’t yet problematic; the big issue this time, the
thing that really sinks Batman Forever and the thing that set the tone
for the sequel and ingrained some of our worst Batman memories is its
treatment of the villain characters.

If I had to sum up how each of the three directors characterized their
villain casts, I would say Burton’s were absurd, yet complex; Nolan’s
were – barring one – dull and lifeless; and Schumacher’s were
obnoxious. Nothing more than that, really, they’re all just annoying.
I know I just said Forever’s climax had a dire sense of urgency, but
imagine how much better it would have been if Riddler and Two-Face
weren’t such gibbering ninnies. Imagine if the animated series Two-
Face had stormed the Bat Cave. How sweet would that have been?

It’s weird, really, and a tragic testament to what happened to the
franchise that Burton could take villains like Joker and Penguin – two
characters who have traditionally been nothing but unrepentant
assholes – and infuse them with enough humanity that we actually care
when they die, while Schumacher can take villains like Two-Face and
Mr. Freeze – two characters who by this point had been firmly
established as tragic figures – and completely deprive them of the
depth inherently built into their origin stories.

Batman and Robin actually uses the Nora Fries history created by the
cartoon series, the one that makes Freeze more an avenging crusader
than nutbag with an ice gun and yet did anyone at any point care one
iota about him? And Two-Face doesn’t even get that, he’s basically
just a clown with a bad rash. The result is that we ultimately don’t
care when Two-Face dies and we kind of wish Mr. Freeze would join him.

And then there’s Bane and Poison Ivy, both of whom are just plain
tedious. Ivy sadly falls into the unfulfilling role of seductress,
which always leads to obnoxious storylines. It’s sad too because the
animated series had recently revamped Poison Ivy into a more
respectable villain, downplaying her seductive side and focusing more
on her kicking ass with killer plants.

And as for Bane… yeah… he never really survives translation well, does
he? Even the animated and Arkham City versions are crap. To be fair
though, he always was just Batman’s own particular nineties apocalypse
gimmick. You know how various comic lines introduced dull, overpowered
beasts (like Doomsday and Onslaught) just to wipe out a bunch of
heroes and call it epic? Well, that’s what Knightfall was to Batman
and it faired better than other such stories because Batman’s rogues
gallery has always been a cult of personality, so it wasn’t enough
that Bane was tough; he had to be clever too. You’d never know that of
course from seeing Batman and Robin because the most you get out of
Bane here is grunting, essentially reducing him to the level of the
contrived comicbook peers he once so easily surpassed.

So of the five villains used by Joel Schumacher, the best is probably
Riddler; granted, he’s just Jim Carrey playing him like a homoerotic
Ace Ventura, but at least he’s funny. Sometimes.

Part of the reason I think this happens is due to the story structure
of Schumacher’s movies (the other part being due to the mandate to
kiddy things up a bit). Burton always introduced his villains
organically through the narrative, with Joker starting as crime boss
Jack Napier, Catwoman beginning as mousy secretary Selina Kyle and
Penguin’s birth opening Returns. But Schumacher begins each time with
an action scene against an already established villain (Two-Face/Mr.
Freeze). Riddler ultimately works the best because we see Edward
Nygma’s transition from dude to freak, whereas the scene where Harvey
Dent becomes Two-Face is a very blink-and-you-miss-it court room snap.

Batman and Robin skews this a bit. Freeze is actually developed better
than Ivy because – even though he’s already running around icing
things in the first five minutes – the movie does spend more time on
revisiting his origin. And while we do see how Pamela Isley becomes
Poison Ivy, Uma Thurman’s forced, scenery-chewing performance and
Ivy’s limited role in her movie compared to Riddler’s (I honestly
think she was just thrown in so Batgirl could beat somebody up) makes
it hard to care about what she’s doing.

Speaking of Batgirl…

The Schumacher era is also unique in that it is the only one of the
three modern eras to include Robin or Batgirl (although I have this
suspicion Dark Knight Rises might end with Batman beginning to train a
young Dick Grayson), which is nice because the sidekicks don’t often
get that much attention and Robin in particular receives a lot of
undeserved hate for his symbolic role in creating the Adam West era.
But however much I like that Robin has finally made a live action film
appearance, he really doesn’t get the best treatment here.

There are some good ideas at play: like how rather than commit to one
of the three official Robins at the time, Batman Forever combines
them, taking Dick Grayson’s name and circus origin, Jason Todd’s
grudge against Two-Face and Tim Drake’s updated, non-elven costume.
But for all that and for all the time spent on Dick and his desire to
join Batman’s crusade (and Batman’s trying to show him a happier way),
Robin just becomes a damsel in distress right alongside the official
damsel in distress. When it comes to the final battle, it’s Batman who
beats Two-Face, Batman who defeats Riddler, Batman who destroys the
evil super gizmo, Batman who saves Chase and Batman who saves Robin
TWICE.

Even Robin’s symbolic maturation, where he chooses not to kill Two-
Face when he has the chance is undermined significantly when Batman
kills him not ten minutes later.

The poor Boy Wonder doesn’t even fare much better in the movie with
his friggin’ name in the title either, mainly because Batgirl’s there
now and this is the nineties, which was a big sci-fi women’s
empowerment decade; this is the decade that brought us Buffy and
Janeway and Xena and Lara Croft and Aeryn Sun and any number of other
strong, tough, independent female characters who could do more than
scream while the guys sorted everything out. And so it’s Batgirl who
defeats Poison Ivy and Batgirl who gets to thaw Gotham, while Batman
defeats Mr. Freeze and Robin… helps Batgirl defeat Bane.

There’s even this one scene right around the Bane fight where Robin
and Batgirl are falling from the telescope. This is later touted by
Robin as a big moment for him, because it’s where he realized Batman
was finally learning to trust him, as he didn’t swoop down to save him
but let Robin sort himself out. And that’s great and all, except that
Robin’s grapnel didn’t catch, and it was actually Batgirl who saved
the day then. And their exchange, where Robin says: “I got you,” but
Batgirl counters “No, I got you” is one of the biggest, most force-fed
girl power moments of the decade.

Which is fine. It is. You know, whoo women. And I actually like
Batgirl in this movie, I do. Alicia Silverstone offers something of a
bland, ordinary interpretation (and she really isn’t given much to
work with), but she has a certain likable quality that sustains her;
and she has some of the most quotable lines.

But that scene was designed as Robin’s big independence moment, so for
Christsake, let him have it. Batgirl already gets the computers thing
at the end, which is more or less fitting because it’s in line with
her previously established hacking ability (although one imagines
correctly guessing the password to your uncle’s laptop is a far cry
from configuring a series of satellites to spread daylight from one
side of the globe to the other). She gets a better girl power moment
when she chastises Poison Ivy’s tired old seductress shtick in favor
of her up-to-date kick-ass modern woman mentality (in a speech that
would make animated series Poison Ivy stand up and applaud). So let
Robin have one damn moment. His name’s in the flippin’ title!

Anyway, calming down, deep breath. Okay. You know, though, for all the
faults and oddities of Schumacher’s movies, there actually is a solid
narrative bedrock to both of them. It’s hard to see because the
superficial layer is a mishmash of hokey aesthetics and bad jokes and
beneath that is a plot of lame B-movie sci-fi clichés (you know, like
stealing brainwaves), but beneath that there is real thematic polish
that actually unites these movies with Burton’s (as they do exist in
the same continuity) and extrapolates on what Batman and Batman
Returns started.

No, really, it’s there.

Take Batman Forever, it has this underlying theme where most of the
characters are compelled toward murder and vengeance. Two-Face is
pathologically driven to kill Batman for reasons we’ll pretend make
sense and Riddler is pathologically driven to kill Bruce Wayne for
rebuffing his homoerotic advances (watch that scene again). Each of
them is fixated on these goals: to cleanse the wound, to “purge the
fixation” as the convenient psychiatrist girlfriend says. And on the
other side, you have Dick Grayson, who is driven to kill Two-Face. His
drive isn’t pathological though, as Bruce knows, it could be.

There are actually two great scenes that sort of mirror each other.
The first is Riddler’s “seduction” of Two-Face, where he suggests
simply killing Batman would be anticlimactic, that when it’s over
he’ll be left with only “wet hands, post-homicidal depression.” And
the other is when Bruce tells Dick what happens after he kills Two-
Face: that his “pain doesn’t die with Harvey, it grows, so you run out
into the night to find another face and another and another, until one
terrible morning you wake up and realize revenge has become your whole
life and you won’t know why.”

Both scenes reflect the same sentiment, that the simple act of purging
the fixation will never be enough. The key distinction here between
heroes and villains is that Riddler is suggesting Two-Face draw it
out, take his time, savor every second; while Bruce is suggesting that
Dick deny this impulse altogether and save himself from a lifetime of
regret.

Because out of all these characters, Bruce is the only one who knows
exactly what he’s talking about, who knows where this can all lead,
because he’s been there before. In this continuity Bruce Wayne’s
parents were murdered by a young Joker and Batman successfully kills
his old foe at the end of the first movie. I’ve suggested in my Tim
Burton Review (which has been mysteriously removed) that this left him
in something of a haze in the second movie; he was lost and without
purpose, essentially going out into the night finding another face and
another, realizing that revenge had become his whole life.

Bruce’s speech to Dick is not only about himself, but about himself in
Batman Returns, which ended with Bruce waking up to the reality of
what he has become when confronted with Catwoman (who acted as his
reflection). His failure to redeem her in the end signified a failure
to redeem or save himself, perpetuating him on the Batman path.

Now, in Forever¸ Bruce gets a new mirror in Dick, a young man whose
past is identical to his own. He acknowledges this directly, talking
to Alfred about a “maniac crying out in the night [and] two shots.” He
sees himself in Dick and so in Dick’s desire to become a vigilante in
his own right, Bruce is forced to confront his own reasons for
fighting and forced to decide whether he should be fighting at all.

His discussions with Chase help us revisit the moment of his origin
and when the impulse toward Batman began; and in the end when he and
and Robin join forces to save Chase and defeat the new villains, two
key things happen: Batman for the first time isn’t fighting alone, but
with a partner, giving him an emotional connection that strengthens
him. And, also, Robin doesn’t kill Two-Face. He could, he clearly
wants to and he’s not exactly disappointed when the man dies anyway,
but Bruce’s message sinks in and he relents; and in this act, Bruce
finds his own vicarious redemption.

Naturally, Riddler tries to disrupt this by making Batman choose
whether to save Robin or Chase, forcing a wedge between his recovering
dualities and sort of revisiting the end of Returns where he was
tasked with stopping Catwoman (as Batman should do) or saving Selina
(as Bruce needs to do), ultimately failing to do either. But this time
he saves them both, catching Robin (the symbol of Batman’s redemption)
and Chase (the cause and focus of Bruce’s emotional catharsis). He has
his cake and eats it too as the saying goes. He gets to be a superhero
and avenge his parents’ deaths while not losing hold on his basic
humanity, and for once creates a real distinction between himself and
his enemies.

And this leads us to our much more relaxed and approachable Dark
Knight in Batman and Robin, a Batman who gets along with people, who’s
touted by reporters as Gotham’s great protector, who holds charity
auctions for crying out loud! I know everybody hates George Clooney
here (and I’ll admit he isn’t great), but it could have been so much
worse. His even keel and straight-faced performance really help
balance out the wackiness and lend stability to an out-of-control
setting.

See, in a world where Robin is a bitchy smart-ass, Batgirl is a
cartoon heroine and the villains are all goons, Batman has become the
stabilizing element, the one thing we can now predict and depend on,
exactly the opposite of what Keaton was. This is significant because
it shows how at peace with himself Bruce Wayne has become, which makes
him more dependable, much more simplistic and straightforward as a
superhero and, of course, infinitely less interesting. Still, it makes
Clooney doing his whole Clooney thing appropriate to the role. This
warm and fuzzy Batman isn’t suited to the grim complexity of Keaton or
the gruff aggressiveness of Bale.

It’s telling really that this is to date the only of the six movies
where none of the villains die; he’s not that kind of Batman anymore.
It’s also notable that Batman doesn’t just defeat Mr. Freeze, but
redeems him in very much the way he once failed to redeem Catwoman. In
convincing Freeze to give him the cure for Alfred (which is
conveniently stored in the Freeze suit) he allows the man to return to
the days before he became a supervillain, back when he was a
scientist, looking for hope.

There is also an underlying motif of family in this movie. Alfred
makes mention of this frequently, suggesting that Bruce needs to trust
Dick because “that is the nature of family,” remarking how “fate and
chance stole [Bruce’s] parents” and how he’s been fighting back ever
since. Well, that he has, going so far as to create a surrogate family
in place of his old one (the introduction of Batgirl now gives us the
core Bat Family), one specifically dedicated to the thwarting of the
criminal element that took his parents in the first place. The sins of
the past are rectified and Batman is at peace.

And this is why I think it’s actually good the series ended after
Batman and Robin. It’s in much the same way Spider-Man 3 could only be
followed by a reboot. In each case, you have superheroes defined by a
past tragedy coming to terms with that tragedy and learning to move
on. Spider-Man forgave the man who killed Uncle Ben and Batman was
able to move on from the death of his family by finding comfort in a
new one. He was able to stop seeing the man who killed his parents in
each of his foes, which is why he stopped killing them.

So, yes, the movies had to end there, because after that where else do
you really go? But, of course, that’s not why the franchise ended. And
after it’s release, there were all sorts of plans for a fifth
installment, promising us Scarecrow and Harley Quinn, but it was never
to be.

And this says it all. Because, despite the criticisms, despite the
systematic undermining of everything that got this series kicking in
the first place, Batman and Robin was a financial success and thus the
studios had every reason in the world to keep milking it. But they
decided not to, because they looked at this campy, garish, hideous
little movie and they were too embarrassed to continue it. That’s
right, the same entertainment industry that gave us this, this and
especially this decided a sequel to Batman and Robin would perhaps be
in poor taste.

So they let it rest, catch a breath, relax and recuperate for a decade
so that when a new Batman movie invariably came out, the Dark Knight
could reclaim a sense of dignity.

It was a nice idea. Shame about the result.